Comment by amelius
3 years ago
I don't get the strong/weak link analogy.
Supposedly, you have a chain with links. The weakest link breaks first.
Now what kind of chain would have its strongest link break first?
Anyway, we might as well call this min/max problems.
Yeah, I wish the author had spent a paragraph shoring up the flawed analogy. Here's how I did it in my head:
Normally, chains have their links in series, in which case the chain breaks when the weakest link breaks. Now imagine two objects connected directly by many links, i.e. a parallel chain. This is a "strongest link chain" where just one strong link, or a few strong links, can hold the two objects together even if most of the links break.
Yes this seems the way to think about it, but on the other hand linking two objects with many weak links will generally result in a strong link, because the force divides between them.